The Holiness of Doing Nothing
Beginning of this week, I was wiped out, literally. I had to spend two days in bed to recharge after the craziness of the last weeks. The terror attacks leave marks on everyone's soul, regardless of how far away we are from the epicentre. So, I was exhausted, my body told me, I need to rest, Chayim told me, I needed to rest, and actually, our Torah portion for this week, says something similar, so with the collected wisdom of 4000 years plus, I rested (and I apologise if I had not yet the time to respond to all the emails that reached me over this long weekend).
Parashat Behar opens with one of the Torah's most radical ideas. Every seventh year, the land of Israel must observe a shmita [sabbatical year]. No sowing, no pruning, no harvesting. The fields are simply left alone. Not because the land is broken, but because rest is not a reward for good work. Rest is a commandment.
Read that again. God does not say: work hard, produce well, and then perhaps you have earned a little quiet. God says: You will stop. Completely. Periodically. Not as a treat, but as a sacred obligation.
We live in a culture that has confused exhaustion with virtue. Busyness signals importance. Productivity signals worth. If you are not constantly achieving something visible, something measurable, you risk feeling like a burden, a failure, or at the very least, a little embarrassed. The cult of output has crept into almost every corner of modern life, and honestly, it has crept into synagogue life too. We fill calendars, we launch initiatives, we measure engagement. And then our bodies simply say: no more.
The Rambam [Maimonides], writing in the twelfth century, described a person who devotes their life to genuine inner service, to prayer, study, care for others, and presence with the Divine as someone for whom God becomes their chelek [portion]. They are not dependent on the relentless machinery of accumulation. They are freed from it. That sounds almost scandalously countercultural today, and yet it was written 800 years ago. Perhaps human beings have always needed reminding.
What the Torah is naming in shmita is not laziness. The barren field is not a failed field. Unused ground is ground that is being restored at a depth no plough can reach. The same is true of us. The things that restore us rarely look productive from the outside: a long walk, a slow conversation, an afternoon with no agenda, sitting quietly with someone you love, or just sitting quietly. These things cannot be measured, and that is precisely why our culture treats them with suspicion.
Rest is not what you do when everything else is finished. Nothing is ever finished. Rest is what you protect, deliberately, before everything else crowds it out (and yes, I will make sure to get better in it, too.)
See you in Shul this Shabbat.
Shabbat Shalom
